Publishers participating in the PubMed project supply NLM with formatted citations prior to or at the time of publication, and NLM adds them to the PubMed search system. If the publisher has a WWW site that offers full text of its journals, PubMed provides links to that site. In addition, PubMed provides a WWW Citation Matcher service, which allows publishers (or other outside users) to match up their own citations to PubMed entries, using bibliographic information such as journal, volume, issue, page number, and year. This permits publishers easily to link from references in their published articles directly to entries in PubMed.
Database Coverage
The PubMed search system provides access to the PubMed database of bibliographic
information, which is drawn primarily from MEDLINE and
PREMEDLINE. In addition, for participating journals that are indexed
selectively for MEDLINE, PubMed includes all articles from that journal, not just
those that are included in MEDLINE. Finally, PubMed also provides
access to the molecular biology databases included in NCBI's Entrez retrieval
system. It is expected that access to additional National Library of Medicine
databases will be added in the future.
Some of the PubMed bibliographic data is transmitted to PubMed directly by publishers, and assigned a PubMed identifier (PMID). This data is also used by the National Library of Medicine as input for PREMEDLINE. For a short period of time, while being processed for PREMEDLINE, this data may appear only in PubMed. When a publisher-supplied citation is subsequently incorporated into PREMEDLINE, it is updated to include the UI in addition to the PMID. Later, when the record receives its MeSH terms and other MEDLINE database elements, it will be updated again. Publishers may also, at any time, submit corrections and updates of their citations to PubMed.
PubMed Journal Information
The PubMed Journal Browser
allows you to look up journal names, MEDLINE
abbreviations, or ISSN numbers for journals that are included in the PubMed
system.
See MEDLINE Journals With Links to Publisher Web Sites for a list of Web-based journals to which PubMed currently provides links. New journals are regularly added. Web-based journals usually contain the full-text of the original article, but this is not always the case. It varies by publisher and journal. Some sites may require that you register, subscribe, or pay a fee in order to view the full text of an article. Contact the journal publishers as noted on their individual Web sites for specific access information.
A full list of the PubMed journals is also available by ftp.
Users can create WWW links to retrieve and display one or more PubMed records, using HTML syntax. See Linking to PubMed and Entrez Databases for detailed information on how to link to specific citations, how to create links that perform searches, how to use Boolean expressions, and how to specify output formats.
The Citation Matcher allows users to match their own list of citations to PubMed entries, using bibliographic information such as journal, volume, issue, page number, and year. The Citation Matcher reports the corresponding PMID or UI. This number can then be used to easily to link to PubMed. This service is used heavily by publishers or other database providers who wish to link from bibliographic references on their WWW sites directly to entries in PubMed.
This facility allows you to find the PubMed ID or the MEDLINE UI of any article in the PubMed database, given its bibliographic information (journal, volume, page, etc.).